Using Portable Apps for e-exams?

What you're proposing is quite complicated, and although admirable probably a little impractical.

I would say that the short answer to your questions is "no". First of all, what exactly do you have in mind with regards to "exam software"? If you're talking about say a simple Word document, then sure you can put Open Office Portable on a USB stick and have the student file out the document with their own answers. However, if there is some specific software you use then first of all you have to make sure it's even possible to make it portable.

As for blocking all other software when insert a USB drive, highly unlikely... in the best case scenario you'd need administrator rights on that particular computer, but in all probability I'm highly doubtful this is even possible.

If you want to go to that extreme, then your best bet would be to create some kind of bootable, self-contained operating system on the USB drive, that once booted runs your application (the exam software) in some kind of "kiosk-mode", so that no other applications are available to the user (the student). Even that is no easy task, but possible. The only downside is that many (older) computers are not necessarily able to boot from USB devices.

So I suppose in summary, there is no easy solution to what you're trying to do (that I can think of), but perhaps other users have some simpler solutions. I suppose it depends in part on the nature of the e-exams and exactly what the student will be expected to do and how they will enter/record their answers.

If these are hardwired computers, remove the LAN cables during the test.

An old solution was to purchase laptops and install the exam software on the laptops. This avoids the administrator rights hassle and maintains the sense of confidentiality.

Our current criterion for providing electronic exams (or class registration, for that matter) is that the host computer lab has to be connected to the internet so we can use a secure VPN into our own servers. Otherwise, we take a couple of laptops.

My only experience of taking e-exams is from within my institution's e-learning system (Blackboard), and we used a computer lab where students were all together and the exam was monitored by the professor for the entire duration. Naturally, cooperative effort was prohibited as was use of the Internet, although possible if particularly sly. Of course, the consequences could be quite severe if caught cheating, as with any examination conditions.

It was a simple but effective solution, but I can appreciate in non-traditional learning environments that might not be a practical solution.

As Darkbee says in his third post, supervision is still naturally a wise idea. With most "kiosk-mode" software running in Windows, if there is full access to the keyboard it can usually be got around: one solution I've seen used is to open up the keyboard and remove the sensors (and springs to make it obvious the keys won't work) of certain keys such as the Windows key and the F4 key. But that's a fairly drastic solution.

Coming back to the portability side of things, I think what you're proposing makes a lot of sense as a way of doing it - though performance may possibly suffer with some apps from running from a slow USB disk. To pursue this discussion, I would suggest that you decide upon the software, or the type of software, that you wish to use for your exams. Then you can see what already exists in the way of portable versions of it, and we can discuss making any software portable which is not already portable, or choosing alternatives.

Three apps:
XAMPP
Moodle
Safe Exam Browser http://www.safeexambrowser.org/

Moodle is an open-source learning system, quite comprehensive, but it does include exam functions. While it is intended to be connected to a server, it can also be installed with XAMPP:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Windows_installation_using_XAMPP
This should render the whole package portable.

The security part is the Safe Exam Browser, which has extensions for Moodle.
It's a little complex to get set up (read: I haven't worked it all out yet) but it is very good at locking down the desktop and only letting you access the Moodle or ILIAS exams that you configure it to. It disables all keyboard shortcuts. As a matter of fact, I couldn't get out of it at first and had to reboot! It turns out that there is a secret key combination that you use to exit the app, and this can be configured by the admin.
Don't know if this can be made portable, as it makes registry entries, but it seems to clean them up on exit. After my hard reboot, I saw the entries, but once I restarted and correctly exited SEB, they were cleaned up.

Yeah, it's a little overkill, but if someone works this out, it could be the tool you are looking for.

@AU2010qu: On second thought, I'd recommend that you avoid portable devices for security reasons. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't pursue the idea of portable exam software, but keep in mind that USB drives are easy to lose. Look at the recent iPhone fiasco. Laptops also are easy to lose and easy to steal (despite my earlier recommendation). In my city, over 90,000 students had their personal information compromised when an admissions analyst lost a USB drive with their personal information on it; earlier that year over 150,000 students had their social security numbers compromised when someone stole a university laptop. My personal SSN was compromised when a laptop was stolen out of an office of the company that carries my school's medical insurance.

Short answer: for security's sake, do e-exams only on a secure internet connection to your organization's server. Thumb drives and laptops are too easy to lose.

Don't stop looking, it will be people like you who solve the problem, but I do not think that right now the technology is up to the security you need to provide.